


It’s All In A Smile.

by CountlessUntruths (KaliCephirot)



Category: Kyou Kara Maou!
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-29
Updated: 2006-03-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 06:40:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9111043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaliCephirot/pseuds/CountlessUntruths
Summary: Huber knows he wouldn’t change anything in his life.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Kind of Previous to [No Regrets.](http://community.livejournal.com/kyou_kara_maou/676654.html%E2%80%9D) I wanted to write a bit of fluff... and got fluff marinated with angst. Go figure.

**It’s All In A Smile.**

“Father! Father, you are back!”

Huber has tried being strict with Eru, wanting to teach his ten-years-old-looking-six daughter proper etiquette and the way she should behave. For example, not running with her dress hitched up and most certainly not to throw herself to his arms as a greeting… but with just a glimpse of hurt in her eyes and he’s doomed. Besides, he can’t say he minds, having his daughter so happy at having him back from wherever he has gone that she can’t help but hug him as fiercely as possible around whichever part she reaches.

Huber has gotten enough practice over the years to know just when he has to reach down so his little girl’s arms wrap tightly around his neck. Since the moment Eru gave her first steps she’s always reaching for him, as if she’s afraid that he’d suddenly disappear. Nicola just smiles and laughs at that, telling him that he’s tied around their daughter’s little finger. He also smiles; (can’t deny what’s true, after all), taking his wife’s hand and kissing the back of it softly. “And around my wife’s.” he adds, smiling when that makes Nicola blush.

“Did you take care of your mother, Eru?” he asks, a knee down over the ground after Eru lets go of his neck to instead hold his hand, warm, dirty fingers over his calloused ones, tucking a strand of brown hair behind her ear, her braid already half undone, spots of grass, dust and mud staining her blue summer dress. Messy strands of hair bounce with her enthusiastic nod and she squeezes his hand, giving him a sunny smile.

“I did! She’s knitting in the garden right now, father! I read to her and I didn’t cause any problem!”

He smiles at the same time that he raises an eyebrow. Eru squirms a little bit, before admitting in a murmur that maybe she had avoided her lessons once or twice over the week he has been absent. His daughter has always favored the study of the nature by her own experience, making him swear that he’s going to end with white hair a hundred years earlier than he thought he would thanks to his daughter’s adventures.

“Eru…”

“I did finish my assignments afterwards!” She is quick to add to her defense, lower lip sticking in a quick pout. “But it’s boring, father!”

“You still need to know them, Eru.” he says, standing up, even though he knows that she knows that he’s not mad. He can’t get angry with her or with her mother, Shinou helps him. Thankfully, Nicola is too sweet to ever use that against him, and Eru, as long as she is allowed to have pets and he takes her out into the woods every once in a while so she can see even more creatures will behave. Mostly. At least it’s practice for their other child.

Nicola is pregnant again, and more now than ever Huber hates having to leave his family alone. His wife assures him that it’s not that amazing, the pregnancy, but he missed all but the beginning of Eru’s, so he adores pressing his hand against the soft swell of Nicola’s belly and close his eyes, imagine that their child can really feel him there, smile when Nicola sighs his name, fingers moving through his hair.

He isn’t the only one excited, after all. If possible, Eru is even more excited than him, and she’ll tell anyone within her proximity about her baby brother and how she’s going to teach him to climb trees and just how to pet a T-Zhou and just about everything she knows (in the privacy of their room, Nicola tells him that she wouldn’t mind if Eru avoided teaching the baby how to call dragons and other animals, and he agrees with his wife).

At times, Huber asks Eru what would happen if the baby was a girl, another little girl like her and Eru, frowning in that way that is completely his, says no very firmly, because she’s already a girl and it wouldn’t be fair if there was another one; besides, since it is going to be a boy, he has to look like father, right? And she wants her little brother to look like father. Whenever Eru brings that up, Nicola agrees wholeheartedly, smiling to him in that way that causes him to smile back.

Nicola’s growing old. No, she doesn’t look old yet, but he knows that won’t last. She’s thirty, still young by human standards, too young for Mazoku or half Mazoku standards (she’d barely start looking like a a teenager if she was) but for human standards she’s already an adult.

Even though he promised when they married to try and not to do it, he can’t stop thinking of the future. Ten years of marriage and he has barely changed. Some new wrinkles, perhaps, especially around his eyes, now that he smiles more. He still looks older than her, but he knows that this is not going to last. In ten years, Eru’ll barely look thirteen, he’ll probably look the same and, by looks, Nicola will be his same age.

The idea that in short of forty, fifty years, he’s going to have to face this world without her scares him like nothing else has ever done. Huber isn’t young by Mazoku standards but he won’t be old for at least another two hundred years. He didn’t die in wars and suicidal missions; he doubts that in this new era of peace he’s going to die before his time is over.

He doesn’t like thinking this. Huber tries not to think of the future in a long term meaning because if he does, he also ends up wondering if he’s going to watch their children die. There is no media around the half blood, it depends on their blood, their will and their strength. There’s no saying with Eru having Maryoku, what she’ll do and what she won’t and how long she’ll live. That they’ll survive Nicola is no wonder. If he’ll survive them… he doesn’t allow himself to think that.

Nicola has made him promise to take care of them. When she’s gone, he’ll continue living for them. No God can’t be that cruel. No parent should survive their children. It’s enough that he’s going to outlive his wife but he thinks that maybe that is also part of his punishment. He never loved anyone before Nicola, so as a payment of his sins, he’s going to lose her after just fifty years of being with her.

Eru is still talking about what happened around their house while he was gone (there’s a new nest over the tree near her window and uncle Gwendal had sent her a book about cute creatures and a bearbee, and when are they going to visit people in Blood Pledge Castle again?) and he’s grateful that his little girl is still young and she hasn’t asked about why her mother grows up so fast. That is a conversation he doesn’t want to have.

Nicola is sitting under a tree, knees tucked under her, softly knitting a blue blanket. The pregnancy is barely starting to show, a small bump curving her dress. Eru lets go of his hand and goes towards her mother, laughing all her way and Huber lets the sight of his family today erase what’s going to come, trying to fool himself by thinking that it doesn’t matter.

Nicola smiles at him, putting her knitting besides her, unable to stand since Eru put her head over her lap, but Huber gets near his daughter, wife (and maybe son) and he tries his best to forget his darkening mood because, in the end, even if he had been warned, Huber knows he wouldn’t change a thing in the past, if only so he could have received just once that smile. 


End file.
